Boysie Singh is not a good man. A poor father, a brutal lover, a pirate and a gangster, he strikes fear into those who cross his path. We know this through the testimony of the women in his life: Popo, a sex worker for whom he has a vicious passion; Mana Lala, the mother of his son, Chunksee; Rosie, a shopkeeper who remembers him as a “raggedy” orphan; and Doris, a social-climbing beauty who carries herself “like I already married a rich man and was living in a big, brick house with a motor car parked up outside”.
Ingrid Persaud’s vivid and fitfully violent novel is the fictionalised story of the real-life Singh, who terrorised the denizens of Port of Spain and the Gulf of Paria in the 1940s and 50s. Boysie is bad news but he also has a rare charisma, which means women can rarely resist him. At the start, we learn via a newspaper article that Boysie has been hanged for murder. Shortly before he died, he protested his innocence, claiming: “I always tried to help people and that is how I got a great deal of my troubles. That is what has me here now.” The hangman, the article continues, “was paid $77 per man for his duties.”
